Tim Grobaty: Events of 11 years ago changed routines and charged up emotions

9/11/12: On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, everything was fine in our house. We were doing the usual school morning routine: making oatmeal or scrambled eggs for the kids, then 5 and 11, pouring glasses of orange juice, watching "Rugrats" on Nickelodeon, making lunches, getting Hannah's clothes ready.

At the same time on another coast, jets were crashing into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania. Here at home, though, "Rugrats" was on, the eggs were perfect and God was in his heaven.

We had an easy day planned. Take the kids off to school, write a column, go home, have a cocktail with the wife, hit the hay.

It was a Tuesday, which is record-release day, and Bob Dylan's new album, "Love and Theft," was coming out to rave advance reviews. We planned to buy it, listen to it, maybe write something about it.

Our daughter knocked on the bathroom door just as we got out of the shower. "It's Mom."

Mom wasn't making any sense. She clearly had something to tell us, but here news was coming over the phone in a white-noise hiss and we could just pick out certain bits as our wife was speaking faster than the speed of facts.

Plane crashed into World Trade Center ...another plane crashed into World ... Terrorist.... Everything grounded ... Should the kids go to school?

Our first thought was, no, of course the kids shouldn't go to school. And we shouldn't go to work. We should all stay safe in our bunker/house eating frozen waffles and playing UNO and watching "Doug" or whatever comes on after "Rugrats" on the news-free Nickelodeon.

But already politicians were on the air urging us to bow our backs and get on with the business of being Americans, who are unique in their ability to bounce back from terrorism and disaster. It's amazing how rapidly platitudes emerge from ruins.

So we took the kids to school, otherwise the terrorists have won, then we went to the store and bought the new Dylan, otherwise the terrorists have won, and we drove to work, passing the spookily quiet airport where nothing was moving at all and we thought what we always think when disasters happen: "Well, there goes our day."

It's a selfish attitude and only our own indomitable courage allows us to confess it here. A certain amount of it comes with working in this business. We can be bounced off our chair in a 6.9 earthquake, and even before we get to the inevitable urge to run out screaming into the street, tossing intervening humans (children and old ladies, typically) out of our way, we think: "Great. A strong quake. Probably tearing up half the Southland. How many mammoth earthquakes have we had to write about? Why do bad things always happen to us?"

OK, now that we've got our unseemly narcissism out of the way, only after we wrote that day's piece (about the networks' coverage and the sudden dilution of all the synonyms for "horrific" and "tragedy") did the impact of the horrific tragedy wash over us.

We stood out in the front yard on the night of Sept. 11 with our son looking at the stars, which were the only bodies twinkling in the sky. No plane flew.

Good God, is this the way things are going to be from now on?

A few minutes later, things changed in the prehistorically quiet sky as a flock of fighter planes (F-15s? F-16? we don't know. We're not an airplane driver) screamed over our house.

That illustrated our own feelings of the day or introspection and more than a little alarm and worry about the future. You recall your own feelings: Most people had the same emotion, a complicated and explosive mixture of abject sorrow, gnawing fear, simmering revenge.

Today isn't one of those key anniversaries of the day that the nation will be especially commemorating on anniversaries ending in a 5 or 0. But, guess what? Dylan has a new album, "Tempest," that releases today to reviews calling it his best work in decades, so there's that.

We're hoping for a good day today. Hannah goes off to Millikan. She's now, tragically, in her senior year (why do bad things always happen to us?) and our boy Ray will go off to his job at Long Beach Airport, where, ideally, airplanes will be coming and going all day long, like they have always been doing except for that time 11 years ago.

And we'll go out and buy the new Dylan and then go in to work and write about something that we hope we don't remember in 11 years.